Could Climate Change Kill Off These Foods?

Some of your favorite foods could be threaten, if climate change continues at its current pace. Coffee and beer, peanut butter, even bacon could be at risk.

“Climate change poses a major challenge to U.S. agriculture,” states a draft of the 2013 National Climate Assessment from the U.S. Global Change Research Program. A warmer planet could affect productivity of crops and livestock, the report continues, and create food-security challenges like we’ve never seen. (We are headed for a worldwide population of 9 billion by 2050.)

More specifically, we’ll likely have to shift where we grow or seek out certain foods, in which waters we look for fish or where we plant grapes for wine, for example, according to Molly Anderson, an ecologist at College of the Atlantic, who has worked on food systems for three decades.

“Successful farming is all about making guesses about when you put your crop in, when you harvest, when it’s going to rain, how much rain you’re going get,” she said to Weather.com. “A lot of those guesses farmers have been making [for] 10,000 years, suddenly they just don’t hold because we’re entering a new era in which we just don’t know what’s going to be happening with weather.”

The slideshow above examines a dozen foods impacted by the changing climate — some for better, some for worse — with detailed explanations below.

Wine

Ever heard of wine from Poland? How about Ukraine? No? Well, it might be in our future, according to Herbert Formayer of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.

That’s because where we’ll be able to grow grapes for wine has already started to change. For some regions unsuitable in the past, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it could spell big trouble for places known for particular varietals and tastes.

“The famous wine regions like Bordeaux, they have specific flavors that come from a combination of the soil and the climate. Now the climate is changing,” Formayer told Weather.com. “In the future, if the temperatures increase, they will not be able to get the [same] characteristics of the wine.”

Even corks could be at risk, Patrick Spencer, executive director of the Cork Forest Conservation Alliance, told Weather.com. “With the temperature changing, the cork trees aren’t being as prolific,” he said. “It’s affecting all the biodiversity of the forest.”

Formayer doesn’t foresee a shortage of drinking wine anytime soon, but he does predict change is afoot. “How will the market react to wine from areas that aren’t known? What happens when famous wine-growing regions are not able to produce good quality wines anymore?” he said. “It will be a huge market shift.”

Wheat

By the middle of this century, we can expect to see large declines in wheat production, Senthold Asseng of the University of Florida, told Weather.com. In June, Asseng published a paper in Nature Climate Change on this topic.

“It’s the third biggest crop worldwide. It’s the most important food crop in the world,” he said of wheat. And it’s affected by climate change in three ways: temperature, rainfall and carbon dioxide.

If rainfall drops, so does yield. If temperature increases, depending on the location, the wheat yield could increase, but it will likely decrease. As for CO2? “CO2 is actually positive for wheat and for many crops,” Asseng said. “It helps to increase photosynthesis and water-use efficiency. It makes the crop more water-use efficient.”

Asseng mentioned several ways to potentially mitigate the situation with wheat. One, we need to better understand the greatest threat. Is temperature the biggest factor, or is it water availability? Two, we should start planning now, breeding heat-tolerant crops, for example, or shifting when we plant.

“It’s just very important that we do understand how climate change will affect wheat production in the different areas in the world,” he said. “It’s really about understanding as much as you can now to prepare.”

Fish

“We know that the ocean has been changing because of climate change,” William Cheung, assistant professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre, told Weather.com. The waters are warmer, there’s less sea ice and ocean acidification is taking place.

For many fish species, that means making a move. Sea bass and red mullet, for example, are found farther north, becoming much more abundant in the North Sea. Cheung also mentioned there’s some evidence of cod and salmon shifting distribution.

This won’t become a global problem in five or 10 years; it’s happening now. Cheung wrote about the changes taking place in a May 2013 article in Nature. “In the last four decades, we are already seeing changes in the species composition in the fisheries catch,” he said. “The fisheries in the Pacific Coast of Canada have been increasingly catching more warmer-water fish.”

Will you still be able to get that wild sockeye salmon you love? Theoretically yes, because there are ways to reverse course — increase fish stock abundance, reduce pollution and other stressors — but it won’t be enough to reverse course completely, Cheung said. “Ultimately we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This is the most effective way to reduce level of impact.”

Chocolate

Cacao is a picky crop. It only grows between 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the equator. It needs up to 800 inches of rain annually, accompanied by a dry season no longer than three months (and even during that season, it still needs rain). It also ceases to grow when temperatures crop up to around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Any change in the temperature or rainfall will severely affect cacao,” Osman Gutiérrez, a plant research geneticist with the USDA-ARS, explained to weather.com. “Bean size is affected by rainfall due to the development of the pod. If they have less rainfall, it’s going to be smaller.”

Some countries in Central America are planting cacao where coffee used to be, after the latter could no longer grow where it started. In other places, like Colombia, the cacao itself is being planted higher up.

Gutierrez said the supply of this decadent treat won’t run out anytime soon — as long as growers can adapt. Some farmers in Africa, he said, are using supplemental irrigation systems. And there’s a breeding program going on to create cacao plants adaptable to the new conditions.

That’s good news for chocolate lovers. No need to start hiding away the good stuff (yet).

Coffee

By the year 2080, all of the suitable climate to grow Arabica coffee could disappear, according to research from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, published in PLOS One. Arabica is said to make a better cup of coffee than Robusta, the other main type. What we tend to drink is a mixture of the two, Kew notes on its Arabica profile page.

For the Arabica study, using computer models, scientists measured the influence of climate change on naturally occurring coffee species. Best-case scenario, 65 percent of suitable localities will be gone; worst-case, that number jumps to 99.7 percent.

“The extinction of Arabica coffee is a startling and worrying prospect,” Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at Kew, said in a news release. “The scale of the predictions is certainly cause for concern, but should be seen more as a baseline from which we can more fully assess what actions are required.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists also put out a warning two years ago about extreme and unseasonal rainfall resulting in a decline in coffee production and expansion of the coffee berry borer, a bug that affects the coffee plant.

So how worried should the world’s coffee lovers be? “They should be concerned. Climate change, local or global, has, is and will continue to influence supply and quality,” Davis told weather.com. “Of course, there is plenty of coffee around and some countries are still overproducing, but medium- to long-term we will face acute challenges with sustainably and quality.”

Milk and Dairy Products

Most people want to eat less food and drink more water when it gets hot. Dairy cows are the same way, Larry Chase, a Cornell University professor in dairy nutrition, told weather.com. “The primary problem is a decrease in feed intake by dairy cows in hot weather conditions,” he said. “Climate change gets involved because it appears that we are getting more of these hotter days.”

In addition, when it’s hotter out, cows use more energy to stay cool. “The end result is lower milk production,” according to Chase. “There may also be small decreases in the milk fat percentage and protein percentage in the milk.”

Predictably, it gets worse during the hot months and in hot places, explained Guillaume Mauger, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, to weather.com. Though the decrease could be substantial in the warmest places and during summertime, the overall impact on dairy products isn’t substantial (something like a six-percent reduction per cow by 2080). And ice cream, butter, yogurt and other milk-derived products are safe, too.

The best way to prevent heat stress in cows is relatively simple: with sprinklers, fans and shade.

Peanut Butter

What would life be like without peanut butter? Two years ago, millions of Americans got the chance to consider it — temporarily, at least — after widespread drought in the nation’s peanut-growing region sent the price of peanut butter shooting up by as much as 40 percent.

Drought affects peanuts, a famously “fussy” plant, in a couple of ways. Farmers can plant them only in ground that gets consistent warmth and rain, and they must harvest them at the right time: If summer rains don’t end by harvest time, peanut pods can’t be pulled from the ground easily. But if the rains end too soon, the pods can dry out and become contaminated by toxic mold.

Even though they’re eaten everywhere, peanuts are grown largely in a handful of Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — all of which are expected to experience hotter and drier summers decades from now, according to the 2009 Global Climate Change Impacts in the U.S. report.

This could lead to a repeat of what happened to the nation’s peanut crop in 2011, when severe drought shriveled many plants on the vine and shrank that year’s peanut stocks by hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Beer

Without hops, barley and abundant water supplies, you can’t make beer. Most of the nation’s barley is grown in the Rocky Mountain states while more than 90 percent of its hops are grown in the Pacific Northwest, where the 18-foot-high vines that produce them thrive in the region’s higher latitudes.

That’s a big reason why Colorado — with its plentiful natural springs fed by runoff from the Rocky Mountains — is considered the ?“Napa Valley of beer.” But all three ingredients are vulnerable to unseasonable weather in the short term. As Jennifer Vervier, the director of sustainability at Colorado’s New Belgium Brewery, told Forbes, ?“climate change puts those ingredients at risk.”

Because the supply chain depends so closely on the availability of these ingredients, extreme weather — especially drought — can have big ripple effects among the more than 2,500 breweries scattered around the country. “If the climate isn’t primed to produce high quality ingredients, many of the ... breweries in America will struggle,” Vervier wrote in a 2011 Washington Post editorial.

“This is not a problem that’s going to happen someday, and this is not a problem that’s just going to impact some industries,” she added in an interview with the Durango Herald. “If you drink beer now, the issue of climate change is impacting you right now.”

Apples

Love the taste and crunch of a sour green apple? It could be harder to find in the future, according to a report released in August in the journal Scientific Reports, which found that Japan’s popular Fuji apples are becoming mushier and sweeter thanks to climate change.

A group of Japanese scientists studied two popular apple varieties — Fuji and Tsugaru — by looking at orchard records from the past 40 years. They found that warmer temperatures earlier in the growing season were linked to changes in the apples’ taste and texture, noting that apples from the orchards they studied had lost much of their acidity and hardness during the past four decades.

Though the changes in the apples have been too gradual for most consumers to notice, “if you could eat an apple harvested 30 years before and an average apple harvested recently at the same time, you would really taste the difference,” says Toshihiko Sugiura of Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization.

Chili Peppers

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, he was one of the first Europeans ever to taste the chili pepper. Today, more than 10,000 varieties of them have been cultivated around the world, for everything from food, shampoo and sauces to pesticides, pepper spray and pain relievers.

But the chili pepper is a finicky fruit that depends on exactly the right conditions to grow, as chef Kurt Friese and his co-authors found on a year-long road trip to discover America’s most exotic pepper varieties, which they documented in their 2011 book, Chasing Chilies: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail.

“We see in the news that global climate change is coming, but the fact is it’s already here,” Freise said in an interview with Indiana Public Media, noting that in places like St. Augustine, Fla., plants that once were grown with ease, like oranges and other citrus fruits, can no longer succeed.

“So farmers are reacting by changing what they grow in many instances, or no longer growing these peppers at all, or finding them in other places.”

Maple Syrup

To make their best sap, maple trees need freezing nights followed by cool days. That causes the sap inside a tree to freeze, creating a vacuum that pulls more sap higher into the tree from the roots. The next day, when temperatures are warmer, the melted sap oozes through to the outside.

Today, warmer wintertime weather in the Northeast — temperatures there have risen about 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit during the past century — is changing the sweetness of the sap produced by sugar maple trees and forcing them to migrate northward, from southern New England into Canada. This could be both good and maple for the maple syrup industry.

“Climate change will produce winners and losers geographically,” explained Dave Cleaves, Climate Change Advisor for the U.S. Forest Service. “Folks who retrieve sap from maple trees in the far Northeastern region will get a longer sap flow season, while those in the Southeastern regions will see a reduction.”

Bacon

Last fall, rumors of an imminent bacon shortage thanks to severe drought in Europe and the U.S. ran wild across the Internet, prompting fears of supermarket lines that would rival 1970s-era scenes of cars lining up at gas stations.

Those fears later proved unfounded, but the lesson behind the reports remains a valid one. Warmer temperatures and extended periods of drought spell trouble for corn crops, which means there’s less feed available for pig farmers. And less feed eventually means fewer pigs from which to make bacon.

That’s how exceptionally severe, long-lasting drought can cause price hikes and supply shortages in the world’s most popular agricultural products, including those like bacon whose consumption once was confined mainly to breakfast but now is used to flavor everything from brownies to vodka.